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Flux Fitness | |||||
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More recent work out oddities are added on top of the page.
I got some actual exercise on Wednesday. Last week I posted about my jogging schedule, and how I was trying to stick to a "twice a week" schedule. I did, last week and the week before, but I hadn't been out since last Thursday, mostly since it rained Friday, I was busy with Valentine's Day stuff on Saturday, and then it rained again Sun-Tues. While it's true that my skin is currently more or less waterproof, and that I could, in theory, jog in the rain, it's also true that my jogging spot of choice is on a dirt trail, and that jogging in the mud sucks. So I kept putting off running on the pavement, and I felt shitty Monday and Tuesday, but finally when Wednesday morning rolled around and it was bright and sunny, and remained that way when I got up in the early afternoon, I forced myself out. It rained buckets the last three days, so running my usual dirt trail was out, and that forced me down from the Lafayette Reservoir upper rim to the paved trail around the lake, where everyone and their Yellow Labrador walks. It's not a bad trail; very curvy and lots of little hills, and the pavement is nice and wide and there isn't any biking or rollerblading permitted there 5 days out of the week (and almost no one uses wheeled vehicles there, other than strollers, even on the days they are allowed). The course is 2.7 miles, and hilly, but never any really long or steep ups or downs, which is exactly opposite of the super hilly upper rim trail I usually frequent. I had not run on any relatively flat surface in a couple of months, and I was actually pretty curious about how fast and far I could go. I generally run about 75% of the upper rim, which is about 6 miles, only walking on the really steep or long hills, since I just don't have the leg endurance or lung strength to keep running up the big ones. And of course I'm tired after about 4 miles, and most of the big steep hills are over the last 2-3 miles, so that's sort of a double whammy. Plus the goats get in the way. My goal Wednesday was to jog around the whole thing, even if I had to really slow down a few times. And I made it, without slowing down too much, other than on a couple of long hills, one early on and one near the end, when my right hip was aching, my left shoulder was stinging to the point that fingers were going numb, and the side cramp I'd been nursing for the last mile was really digging into the right side of my rib cage. I was pretty happy about making it, though I was more relieved than overjoyed, since I thought I should easily be able to run that far. I was able, but it wasn't easy. The whole course took me about 24 minutes, or close to 8 minutes per mile. That's not bad, I could make 7 miles in an hour at that pace (not that I could keep it up for an hour) and could complete a marathon in 3.5 hours. At least I could if the 26 miles of the marathon were broken up into 3 mile segments and spread out every 3 or 4 days for a month. *cough* I had enough leg energy to do another lap, though there's no way I'd have made the whole thing running, but my hip was really hurting, my left Achilles was sore once I stopped and started stretching it, and I had only found two quarters in my car when I got there, and the meters in the park only give you 15 minutes per quarter, and take quarters only, so I would have had to go get change at the ranger station a quarter mile away, then return, or hope the ticket gods smiled upon me. I decided that I was fine with just a quick little nearly 3 mile run, plus this way I can, in theory, have the legs to go out again on Friday. If not, I'll have to wait until Monday, unless I get up early, which is unlikely.
I went for a jog today, my usual 6 mile jaunt around the very hill reservoir upper rim trial, and made it in my best time ever, and felt pretty good during the run. There's been no rain here for nearly a week, which is the longest dry stretch since about October. As a result the trail was mostly dry on Monday, when I last ran, and was almost entirely dry today, making for excellent footing and traction, and no extended scrub brush and bucket of water clean up when I got home, which is what my shoes usually require. It's as much a running aid as a cleanliness desire; when I'm running and it's muddy I feel like I've got weights on my legs. As for the run today, it was nice. I can't say that I exactly enjoy jogging yet, but I like being out in the wild and seeing trees and grass and running on dirt, and I feel pretty good once my legs get loose and I'm making good time on flat or downhill. I'm in good enough shape now, after doing this once or twice a week for a few months, to jog pretty much indefinitely on the flat or downhill, at a good pace. I have to slow down going uphill, and I walk on the really steep hills on the trail, and on most of the shallow ones as well the last couple of miles, when I'm tired and the hills are at their largest. So I feel pretty good when I'm still fresh and running on the dirt and it's flat or downhill, as most of the first 2 miles are, where I run. It's later on, when I'm struggling up another painfully steep hill (I'm serious, you couldn't get up these hills if it was really muddy, and if you fell you'd probably roll a while before you could stop tumbling and sliding.) that I start to wish I were done now, thank you, and forget about that weight loss and fitness boost and enjoyment of nature. I still get frustrated that I can't run the whole thing, up and downhill, and that I can't do it twice just for good measure. Someday. It's funny, since I spent several hours Tuesday and Wednesday going over old blogs from last January and February, and adding select portions to the articles section. And when I read this one, from almost exactly two years ago, I had some weird deja vu.
That was biking, this is jogging, but the principle is the same. I never quite got to the point I wanted to on the bike, and it was a lot more fun to ride that than to jog, since I love speed, but mostly since I had the great Mission Trails park area to ride around in, near my dad's house in San Diego. I've yet to find anywhere that good to mountain bike here, at least nowhere near enough that I can just jump on the bike and ride there in ten minutes, and I don't like having to drive a long way to go work out. One advantage of jogging, at least, is that I can do it anywhere, and that it tires me out far more quickly. I had to ride for a good 90 minutes to get a really good workout on the bike, but I'm soaking in sweat and well-lathered after 20 or 30 minutes jogging, and wiped out after an hour. I'm trying to stick to a twice a week schedule, which is about all I can do at this point, since the day after a run my legs are aching and barely support me going down stairs, and on the second day they're better, but still far from fine. Tonight I'm sorer than usual, and had to take an Advil a while ago, but mostly my thighs just throb, which makes stretching my legs out straight a sort of mini-orgasm of delight. Malaya kneaded them a bit earlier, much to my delight, and I'm angling for a bit more of that later. Her back has been sore for a while, and I rub it and put elbows into it when she needs them, so it's all fair. Mostly.
Running! Recreational running, I mean. If you're looking for advice on what to do if you're black and in Pittsburgh and see a K9 unit coming, this isn't exactly the best spot to look for advice. I've been jogging about once every other week for a while, but I'm trying to move it up to a more regular schedule. I have gone three Saturdays in a row, though I'm unlikely to go today, since I went Thursday, just two days ago, and I'm still sorta sore in places. My back, mostly, though that became sore in the after-run stretching, oddly enough.
The biggest challenge in running here is that I don't like running on pavement, it rains a lot here, and in news that I was not aware of back when I lived in San Diego, water from the sky + not pavement = mud. Three out of the last four times I've gone running I've been trampling through mud puddles, and while that's not the end of the world, it does affect my pace some when I have to slow down to avoid slipping and falling on hills. It's also disturbingly tiring to run with a bunch of tacky mud stuck to the bottom of your shoes. You wouldn't think you'd notice it, I mean I weigh 170 or something, and probably 30-40 pounds of that is in each of my legs. So what's another 1 pound (if that) of mud on the bottom of both feet? And yet when I'm running and it's very gluey and stuck on there, it feels like my shoes are made of metal. Heavy metal! I don't mean like aluminum or titanium or zinc or something. I'm talking lead. Or at least copper. Anyway, the following was written mostly last weekend, and bumped from being posted all week due to more pressing blogging. But don't let that slow you down.
Saturday I got my lazy ass out and did my usual 5.5 (or so ) mile jog around the upper rim of the Lafayette Reservoir. It's a lovely course, winding in a long circle across the tops of various hills and valleys that surround the mostly man-made lake, and descending to the lower level just once, for about 1/4 mile at the parking lot/concrete reservoir area, where all of the huge flocks of noobs walk on the paved and mostly flat walking path. The whole rest of the way you're mostly on your own, atop the hill hills, passing someone heading the other way every 10 or 15 minutes, and enjoying the views of the lake and the roofs of houses on the other side of the hill. I recommend it. At first, months ago, I'd run/jog in spurts, until my legs started to go wobbly, or more often I'd go until my heart would feel like it was going to burst, or I couldn't get enough air to keep going, or else I'd get a blinding side cramp. At that point I'd have to go to a walk, uphill, downhill, or on the flat, until I recovered enough to run some more. Over time I've gotten better at it though, more in shape (legs at least, I'm not thinner than I was last summer, just more fit) and able to run longer, or at least smarter. A lot of it is just learning to pace myself, how long my strides should be for the incline or decline I'm traveling over, how to breath and not get a side cramp, etc. I always walked a lot with my old stadium job, and usually covered 5 or more miles a night, mostly up and down steps. I just never ran for more than a minute at a time, and seldom even for that long, and never very fast. So my legs were very strong, and I didn't get tired when I was in good shape (preserved by mountain biking in the off season or when the team was on the road for 10 or 12 or 14 days at a time), but I didn't have much endurance, though I wasn't running then to put that to the test. I never considered running back then, since I had to do it at work, but mostly since I much preferred biking, and there were tons of great trails and dry weather in San Diego, year round. Also, my knees, ankles, feet, hips, shins, etc, were pretty much constantly in pain (not all at once, but always something) due to all of the pounding they took on the hard concrete at work. It often hurt just to walk, both at work and elsewhere, so it would have been rather foolish to go out jogging at that point. Bike riding was work on my knees, but it's no impact, and is great at building strong leg muscles. Plus it's fun, you get to cover distance, see sights, roll down steep hills, etc. Up here, as I've blogged about in the past (which is my little way of saying that I'm not going to go into it in detail here) bike riding has lacked. Nowhere real near to do it on good trails, narrow country roads where we live, Malaya not used to biking or much wanting to do it over distances, etc. Hence I've turned to jogging, something I'd never done in my life other than during PE in high school, and had always thought I'd hate. Surprisingly enough, I don't hate it, and actually find it pretty enjoyable when I'm going well. One thing I do find in common with my bike riding and jogging is that I hate to do either of them on the pavement or on city streets. Biking it was just a matter of choice, as well as being worried about some drunk or nut taking me out with a car. It smells, it's noisy, you have to avoid parked cars and moving ones, and you have to ride forever to get a good workout since the bike rolls so easily. When jogging, the concern with being hit isn't there, and jogging is so much more work and so much more tiring than riding that the distance/time required for a work out isn't a problem. It's mostly the noisy and smelly cars that bother me, other people in the way, cars pulling out of driveways to avoid, traffic lights slowing me down, etc. And there's the added problem of running on such a hard surface hurting my feet. Asphalt is softer than concrete sidewalks, but there you're half out in the street, and you've got to consider the whole, "killed by a car" issue again. Which is why I like the reservoir rim trial so much, since it's away from cars, hard pavement, noise, all bikes, and most people. The problem with it, for a neophyte jogger such as myself, is the terrain. There are hills, and more hills. Only a few are long (the worst being Widow Maker, which is about half a mile long, winding, and encountered just after you start back up the dirt path past the parking area, if you're heading counterclockwise, which is the way I generally go) but lots of them are very steep. A few you literally can't climb if it's muddy; you'd just slip and slide, or so I imagine, and the long skidding footprints tell me. I start about halfway around, where a city street comes near the trail and allows me to park somewhere other than the crowded, parking meter enforced lot, and if I go left from there (clockwise) I'm immediately faced with the steepest hill of the entire circuit. And I mean steep; there's no way you could ride a bike up it, and I'm not entirely sure you could push one up it, unless you had good traction. It's like ski lift steep. It's not a good start to a run, since there's no way on earth to run up it, and even walking you reach the top winded and leg sore, unless you go very slowly. So I start off the other way, and that's a great start since it's mostly downhill, as the rim trail slopes around towards the parking lot, which is probably about 1.5-2 miles away. The last time out, Saturday, was my best run ever, and I made it across the parking lot and started up Widowmaker in 16 minutes, and only had to slow to a walk twice, on two hills that are short, but so steep that the pace I have to drop to in order to keep "jogging" up them is more like a high-stepping walk, and is actually slower than I go if I just bend at the waist and put my hands on my knees and walk up it as fast as I can manage. But other than that, I run all the way, faster on flat and downhill, slower uphill, trying to keep my respiration and legs about equally stressed, for the best work out. Two miles in 16 minutes is an eight minute mile, and that's not exactly world class. However I'm totally estimating the distance from where I start to the parking lot, there are a lot of hills, and I've only been jogging for about 4 months, and very irregularly over that time. The whole thing takes me a little over an hour, and that's all running with some fast walking, on the hills. In fact, I don't even know how long the entire thing is. I've seen the distance listed anywhere from 5-6.5 miles on various websites and maps. I suppose the variance is due to the numerous side trails and turn offs, plus whether or not they include the whole circle, or don't count the 1/4 to 1/2 miles of paved parking lot. The most detailed description of the hike, as well as numerous rather ugly photos taken during the harsh sunlight of a late summer hike (hence the brown and yellow of everything; it's currently muddy and very green) can be found on the Bay Area Hiker website. They list the distance as 4.69 miles, but they take the inner trial a little bit on each end, which is a lot shorter, and they only count the part they're on the dirt. So anyway, it's 5-6 miles, and the hills are crippling, as even the BA Hiker site admits. My best time is just about 55 minutes, and that's walking most of the 2nd half. I suppose a 9 or 10 minute mile isn't bad, considering the terrain and my noob jogger nature, but I'd like to get the whole thing down to 40 or 45 minutes. This is why I can't play games that don't keep score. I have to compete against something, even if it's just against myself. My biggest bursts of speed and running ability on the trial come when I sight people in the distance, especially if they're going the same way as me. I must pass them, and on the run. I just must. Unless they're faster or have more endurance than me, in which case I want to trip them into the mud, cut their throats, and have sex with their hot, sweat-filled running shoes. Well, not really. At least not the shoes part. Speaking of shoes, mine are doing very nicely. They were an Xmas gift at an after Xmas sale in San Diego, they're Asics Gel Koji running shoes, and I've yet to have any sore feet problems at all, even after my few runs on pavement. I've had some sore hips, and my leg muscles get very tired, but the feet are golden. The shoes flare out at the sole for a wider impact zone, have gel and cushion padding, a half inch cut out below the heel so the impact is spread to the sides of the feet, and so on. But no, I don't have their suggested "companion" $12 multicolored running socks. In fact the only reason I have these $110 shoes is that they were on close out after Xmas and dad got them for just $35. When I was young and (more) foolish I refused to pay more than about $20 for sneakers, figuring they were all the same. A job at the stadium that required endless running up and down steps and several years of constantly sore feet, shins, knees, ankles, hips, etc, later, I started to come around to the benefits of better shoes, and the last few years I spent $80 or $90 on good, Air Nikes with gel inserts and shoe orthopedics and all that happy shit, and most of my sore feet issues went away. I'm not good at spending money on anything I don't entirely need to survive, but if I need to get something, and I'm going to use it constantly, and I'm going to regret it forever if I skimp and get a pretty good one when a good or great one wouldn't have been that much more money, I'm trying to get myself to just buy the better quality one and be happy with it. This mostly goes for things I use a lot, such as shoes, or a computer monitor, or keyboard, or mouse, or sunglasses, or whatever. Things where you could easily get by with cheap, and where the more expensive seems like a needless luxury, but that you'll really appreciate over time. Ironically, I've been really good at using this reasoning as an argument for years, way back in the days before I was the one doing the buying. It's just taken longer to start working on me than it did to work on my parents. I still have the leather book bag that I talked my dad into getting me for $100 back in the early 90's, rather than a cheap nylon one or a backpack for $20. And the leather bag is still in perfect working condition, while many a nylon bag and backpack has come and gone. So there. One anecdotal case always proves the rule, when it's a case I like.
As for exercise, I've yet to try out my new running shoes, and I regret that. I have a valid excuse; I didn't get them until several days after Xmas while on vacation in SD, and I didn't have any clothing or motivation to go jogging in/with there. I got sick in the airport on the flight back and was in no shape to go running in the cold weather here for several days, and it's rained almost every day since I've been back here and not sick. I was all primed to jog some on Friday, but when I got up in the early afternoon and went into the bathroom, the first thing I heard were raindrops pounding down on the skylight. And while I want to get some exercise and I'm not likely to dissolve in the rain, I'm not yet feeling quite so motivated that I'll brave 45 degree weather and rain to break in my new running shoesies. The shoes are completely virginal; I have worn them to dinner twice and to the mall once. I'm talking oh... perhaps as much as a kilometer of pavement passed beneath their nubby, white and orange gel-cushioned soles. And a flight or two of stairs as well, if you can imagine. Tomorrow is Saturday and there's playoff football on, but if the weather is decent when I get up I'm going out jogging. And that's despite the fact that the early game is Carolina vs. StL, and that's on at 1:30 here, just about the time that I'll likely be rolling out of bed. Oh well, this is the sort of thing that the Japanese perfected VCRs for, eh? Malaya wants TiVO too, but so far I'm refusing to pay half of $350 for a glorified VCR when I don't want to watch goddamned TV anyway!] The problem I have with jogging is that I get bored running on the street, or even on pavement. It's just flat (mostly) and hard and there are cars and damn punk skateboarding kids whose knees don't hurt when they locomote in sneakers. But since it rains about 6 inches a week here, all of the dirt trails and paths that I'd prefer to go jogging on (both for scenery and terrain and my knees) are all mud pits. I never thought I'd say it, but a gym membership is looking pretty good to me at this point. I could go and work out on a variety of machines, lift some weights, and do it all in under an hour. If there were only one nearby us. Well, one that was nearby and affordable. Failing a health club or sufficient motivation to jog in the rain, I am at least getting back into doing lots of sit ups and push ups a day, and I'm stretching as well. I'll be snowboarding at least a couple of times this winter, and that sport puts amazing stress on your legs, mostly on the quads (front of your thighs). When I used to board all the time I always stretched out my quads, and they'd still get aching sore/cramping by noon on a day of boarding. Sit ups and push ups and wrist exercises and grip strengtheners and some leg stretching is no replacement for a real exercise program... but like most of live, it's better than nothing.
I've recently taken up jogging, but unfortunately I don't have any interesting stories to tell about it yet. Some people can break out the whole inspirational "I was 100 pounds overweight and the first time I barely made it to the end of the street before I started to puke but I stuck with it..." angle, or else talk about how they hadn't exercised in years and found how much better they felt as they got healthy once they begin running and eating better, or how their boy/girlfriend got them to start running and they realized it was the right thing to do, etc. None of those angles work for me. I was already in good shape, I was already losing weight, I already have a good diet, and my girlfriend has been working out every day for months, independent of me. Basically I'm not walking/running anymore at work since I quit that job when I moved out of San Diego in July, and I've not found any place good around here to ride my bike yet (and by "good" I mean "lots of steep dirt trails), and I don't like swimming in the tiny pool in our condo complex enough to do that regularly for exercise. I had never jogged before in my life, mostly since my knees/feet/ankles/etc were always too sore from all the walking at my old vendor job at the San Diego stadium. I'd also disliked running, much preferring to rollerblade or bike ride, but since I haven't been on rollerskates in a couple of years, and as I said earlier, there aren't any good bike riding areas here (that I know of) and I don't like swimming enough to stick to it... jogging was the last, best alternative. I jog much like I bike ride, though. I find riding my bike just on normal city streets way too boring. Even if there are hills and some nice scenery, it's still a street. I could drive my car there if I really wanted to travel that path. Jogging is worse than bike riding though, since it's much more work, and you move much slower. What I like to do is hike. And by hiking, I mean walking places that are mostly dirt, and mostly steep, with a good view, ideally. My jogging means I'm hiking, with occasional bursts of running mixed in. Unfortunately, I'm not any good at jogging. I walk very quickly, with long strides, but with a lot of bounce. My mom always says she can pick me out of any crowd at a distance just by how much I go up and down when I walk. I'm not aware of it while I do it, but Malaya has commented on it as well, so I suppose they're correct. My jogging stride is similar, with long strides and a lot of up and down, and that's great for 100 yards or whatever, but when I'm trying to keep it up for more than 1/2 a mile at a time, any extra movement is bad. And I make a lot of extra movement. I've only been jogging about half a dozen times, and I'm getting better each time, and making a conscious effort to practically shuffle as I trot along, as well as forcing myself to go slower than my normal jogging speed. I wouldn't exactly call it "fun" but it's not unenjoyable, at least when I'm not gasping for breath at the top of a hill you'd need skis to descend safely and trying to shove my entire rib cage through my abdomen in an effort to deaden the throbbing of my latest side cramp. My legs are still strong from all of the walking at the stadium and the bike riding I used to do, so they don't get tired, but I get the most godawful side cramps. They don't cripple me, but I have to stop running and sometimes even stop walking and just concentrate on taking really deep breaths until it goes away. It's pretty sad to think that not only am I unable to walk or run properly, but that I can't even breath correctly, but that seems to be the case. I have looked around online for some stitch-prevention tips, and found lots, but none have really helped me yet. I concentrate on taking full deep breaths, being sure my entire lungs fill, and the exhaling them as fully as possible, but I don't seem to have the knack of it yet. I tend to get them early, and not later once I'm warmed up, but whenever they occur, they aren't any fun. A note on the side-cramp prevention: it's funny that both the above-links talk about breathing and stretching and why the diaphragm cramps up; mostly due to insufficient exhaling, which is probably my problem. Neither of them say anything about diet or fluid shortages, and they admit that it's virtually impossible to stretch out a cramp in your chest or under your ribs. One even explains why it's not like a leg cramp, and that potassium and dehydration doesn't have anything to do with it. So of course the next site I checked, one that's apparently using info from the US Army, talks about how you should eat more potassium and drink more water and stretch it out to deal with runner's cramp. Not that I would take exercise tips from the US Army, the world leader in killing recruits through heat stroke, but it's funny to see their info completely contradicted by other fitness sites.
My jogging path the last two times out (last Tuesday and then again yesterday) is the outer rim trial around the Lafayette Reservoir, and it's hard to compare a time for that to any other running, since maybe 15% of it is flat, and there are some truly amazing hills. The steepest you're literally sliding back down a bit with each step going up, and you descend with care, taking sliding little steps. Running down is not an option on the steepest ones; you would literally go head over heels. Anyway, I managed to run about half the time yesterday, and did the full 6+ miles in just over an hour. I'd like to get to where I could run around almost the entire thing, with the only walking coming on the hills that are steeper than a flight of stairs, and if I got to that point I suppose I'd start trying for a faster time, being the stat-interested, self-competitive type of guy I am. If I wanted a more accurate reading on my actual running ability, I would use city streets, or go to a track somewhere, but see my above comments about the utter boredom such a path inspires in me. The reservoir upper rim is relatively scenic, has a lot of interesting hills, little foot traffic, and no cars to worry about some drunk driving into me, which is another major reason I don't like riding my bike on the streets.
I'm tired, probably since I was up too late yesterday, slept late but fitfully, and then went for a high impact jog in the afternoon. Malaya has been working out for months, and is steadily losing weight and firming up. I've been losing weight for no apparent reason, probably just since I'm not lifting weights anymore, but my waist is narrower than it was 3 months ago when I first started to think I was getting skinny. It's weird, since I'm not making any effort to diet here, and I'm not getting as much exercise as I was in San Diego. I guess I was just eating a lot there and didn't really realize it, and now that I'm usually sharing my meals with Malaya and not staying up for 24 hours at a stretch and snacking a lot, the pounds are dropping away. We don't have a scale here, so I can't confirm that, but pants that were tight on my waist/hips some time ago no longer are. This is a good thing, but it's odd to have it happening without me making any effort, when I had so much trouble losing 5 or 10 pounds in the past when I really wanted to. I am trying to get into doing more exercise, and for the first time in about 12 years, I can consider jogging. I never could back in San Diego when I worked at the stadium, since I did so much walking and running at work, on concrete, up and down steps, I constantly had sore legs, ankles, feet, hips, etc. The idea of going out in my spare time and exacerbating that with more pounding was insane. I'd rollerblade or bike ride for exercise, since those were much lower impact on my legs. Since I've been here for a few months though, and haven't had sore legs and haven't been beating them up with a stressful job, I figured I could try it. Malaya runs on the treadmill and elliptical machine at the gym, and enjoys trying that some in real life, though she usually finds out the difference between "gym muscles" and real muscles in a hurry. Anyway, we've been going out for hikes and long walks and have worked out way up to jogging some of the time, so Thursday night while she was off to have dinner with some of her colleagues, I went for a jog around the Lafayette Reservoir. I posted pictures of it back in August, but those were just of the lower path, which is paved and well-traveled and about 3.5 miles around. There is an upper path also, and it's hard-packed dirt, goes up and down painfully steep hills, and is over 6 miles. There are half a dozen very steep trails between upper and lower, and we've found a street that dead ends right at one dip in the upper trail. So I drove over to there, parked, headed out along the upper trail, took the first path down to the lower one, and jogged and fast walked around it until I was back near my starting spot, at which time I cut back up to the upper trail, followed it for a bit, and then returned to my car. Exciting, isn't it? No, no it's not. But it was good exercise. I figure I went about 4.5 miles, about 3 of that on blacktop, and ran for probably 40% of the time. It took me about 50 minutes from leaving my car to returning to it, and I sweated and had a high heart rate the entire time. Hours later, the only soreness I have is in my left Achilles and my hips, and I think that's mostly from the jarring I got running down some of the very steep dirt hills. Malaya's goal is to be able to jog around the entire inner path without pause. I share that goal, but I'd like to be able to do it at a faster rate than jogging, and I'd like to be able to run the entire outer trail, with some allowances made for the incredibly steep hills. Running down them is suicidal, running up them is a heart attack. But it's damn good exercise, and more fun than just tooling around the winding inner paved path. Plus you get more sun, and my pasty white skin needs all the help it can get.
On Saturday we went out to the Lafayette Reservoir and walked around it again, but up high, on the very hilly reservoir rim. While there we saw about half a dozen joggers, all men on their own, and every one of them was at least 30 pounds overweight, despite being out running a very difficult course and sweating profusely. We've seen the same thing every time we ride bikes or go for a hike, and I find it weird. People in Northern California are much thinner than the average person in San Diego, at least based on my living down there for many years, and being up here for about 3 months. A far higher percentage of the regular men/women I see walking around the Bay Area are fit, or perhaps just don't eat very often, but quite often Malaya and I see these guys who look fit from the feet to the knees, and chest to the head, but have a huge beer gut in the middle. That's not unusual in life, but we see them here out jogging or biking, and working damn hard at it. How do they stay so obviously fat when they are working out like that? Do they jog 10 miles and stop for a triple cheese burger on the way home? Are they complete weekend warriors who have strong hearts and lungs due to intensive workouts on the weekends, while they live sedentary lives all week and eat too much? It's a mystery. I'm certainly not criticizing them; they're out there trying as hard as they can, and I'd rather be fat and fit than skinny and inactive. I just wonder what their diets and lifestyles are like to allow them to remain in that sort of shape despite such intensive exercise.
On Thursday Malaya had to work late, and was gone all afternoon and well into the evening. I got some work done, found some more l33t and roxor stuff playing the d2x v1.10 beta patch (my 8th and 9th new elite unique items and a Vex Rune), and then actually went out all by myself. Outside, where there are bears and everything. I went for a bike ride, and while that wasn't anything unusual back in the day in San Diego, it was the first time I'd gone out on my bike since I'd been here, other than last week when I went out with Malaya the day she got her new bike. That day was more of a pleasure ride, as we had fun being together and riding places we'd never been before. We got some good exercise, and my legs were sore the next day, but she was the one really getting a workout, mostly since she didn't earn her living running up and down stairs for most of the last decade, and hadn't ridden a real bike in a couple of years, and as she said, "The bikes at the gym don't work the same muscles as a real bike." Anyway, the first ride was for fun, but the second one by myself on Thursday was for a work out. I covered the same long trial Malaya and I rode last week; I just did it at a much faster speed and with no rest stop at the bottom to drink water and eat some dried fruit and almost get stung by a hovering hornet. Actually Malaya did get stung, but apparently she brushed it off before it injected any venom, or the hornet was just giving a warning, since it hurt for a minute, but didn't swell up any. I rode past the bench we were sitting on when she was stung though, nearly at the end of the downhill section of the path (at which point you have to turn around and go back uphill for about four miles). No hornets were in evidence, but I didn't sit around there to wait for them either. I did stop about 20 feet from there and send her a text message on my cell phone to say that I had reached hornet bench. Her reaction? "Ohhhh. I was so happy that you remembered and would call it that and would text me about it." That wasn't her actual text reply; that's what she said when I asked her just now, while she's sitting on the couch to my right and petting kitty and waiting on me to finish the blog so we can go to bed. The real work out on that trail is the return, since as I said, it's almost all downhill going, and therefore almost all uphill coming back (sudden earthquakes not withstanding). And a workout I got coming back, as I kept at the highest speed I could manage, occasionally standing up and really pumping to get my speed back up, at least as long as I had the energy to do so. The only problem with the trail, other than it being almost entirely straight and paved and sort of boring to my mountain biking soul, is that it crosses a ton of residential streets, none of which have a stop sign there. Well, there is a stop word, painted on the ground, but unfortunately it's pointing at the trail in each direction. And I don't want to stop, I want to ride on and keep my legs churning and my heart rate up. No one really stops, unless there is oncoming traffic that forces you to do so, assuming you see it in time and your stop isn't of the more sudden and permanent style. But you do have to slow down and look, and most of the streets have parked SUVs and other ugly, vision-obstructing vehicles beside the trail openings. I don't like those at all. They are very quiet residential streets, for the most part, but the one time you just flash through one with your fingers crossed is the one time granny is coming home with the new Expedition filled with groceries, and her reflexes on the stop pedal ain't what they used to be. And that's assuming she doesn't pull the infamous "old man at the farmer's market" brain lock thing and floor it right into your ass, forgetting which pedal her palsied foot is tromping down on. So that trail is okay, and mostly shady during the hot late afternoon, courtesy of a variety of tree cover and steep hillsides to the west. But it's very smooth and relatively boring. There are, however, a lot of other large paths through the bougie suburban woods and backroads in this area, and Malaya and I have a trail map and just recently browsed several overpriced books on local hiking trails while at a Border's Books. So we'll try some other stuff out next time. And if we find one I like, I'll do it myself on days when she's off at the gym or at work. She of course headed straight to the gym after she got home from work, and was already gone when I came in, gasping and drenched in sweat, from my bike ride. We decided to go over to Subway for dinner, and while we usually walk the mile or so there, this time we drove. And had a damn struggle just getting out of the condo and into her truck, what with that whole "you must lift your legs to walk" thing. But that's the whole fun in working out, right? Feeling tired and sore that night?
I blogged recently about the physically-demanding Parcourse in a local park. Malaya and I ran the whole thing one day last week and aside from the excessive lunges I did (an exercise not exactly recommended by the Parcourse literature) that rendered my hamstrings incapable of flexing or bearing weight for about 3 days afterwards, it was a great work out. My favorite part was the pull up bar, mostly since I miss the conveniently located pull up bar I had back in San Diego. It was located right in the middle of my living room ceiling, and I'd do 8 or 10 of them every time I got up and walked past it. Well, not every time, since I went past it probably 250 times a day, but I did them quite often, and just hung to stretch out my back plenty of other times a day. I brought the bar and the chains that suspended it with me, but it's not installed anywhere here since this is Malaya's condo and unlike me, she's not totally bereft of her decorating senses. So I've been wishing I had a good place to do pull ups on a daily basis, and now, thanks to our discovery of the Parcourse, I do. It's a bit further away from here than the living room, and I'm not actually going to ride my bike or drive over there every day just to do a dozen pull ups, but I feel comforted just knowing it's never that far away. Sort of like George Bush and his "9/11. Terrorists. Freedom." all purpose catch words.
The photo you see here was taken by Malaya, and it shows me mid-pull up, wearing my ridiculous biking helmet and all-too-matching clothing. I have lost some muscle over the last couple of months since I've not been working out much and not doing any pull ups, but I can still rattle off 10 pull ups, though the last couple were quite a struggle. And as I should have mentioned earlier, Malaya got a new bike just last week; a shiny red 21 speed one. It was a bit of an impulse purchase, in that we weren't thinking "bike" when we went into Price Club, but since we'd been talking for a while about getting her a bike so she could ride with me, it wasn't like we got it totally out of the blue. Unlike the big flat $250 flat screen TV we almost got at Price Club two months ago. The bikes there looked okay, they had good helmets for cheap, and since the bike was far cheaper than anything remotely comparable would have been at a bike shop, we figured why not? Malaya paid for it, since it's her bike and she wouldn't let me pay half. And our first ride came just the next day, and took us past the pull up bars you see above, where I did the pull ups you see above. We had a nice ride, traveling about 10 miles in total, after which I felt tired and Malaya felt exhausted. She rides a stationary bike all the time at her gym, but as she pointed out, fitness muscles don't equal real world muscles. And having to keep your eyes open and your balance active and steer and adapt to changing inclines makes for a far more tiring experience than you get just closing your eyes and pumping away on a work out bike at the gym. More bike rides to come, and hopefully more pictures of them as well. And no, I didn't get a shot of Malaya and/or her new bike. My bad.
Friday we did get out, and ran a Paraourse at a local park. (Not the one linked to in the previous sentence, which appears to be in Virginia.) The course was just set up on a long, relatively straight paved path, one that had constant walkers and bikers traveling along it. No rollerbladers though, that past time seems to be pretty uncommon up here, at least outside of downtown SF. Not that I saw anyone there on them either, but there certainly isn't anyone out here in the bougie burbs riding them. In fact I have seen a grand total of one rollerblader since I've been here, and it was an old guy heading up the side of the road not far from the park, about a week ago. And he was like 50 and buried in padding and a helmet and the whole protective gear thing. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, since much of the lower section of today's blog was going to be about various random cultural differences between here and San Diego, my former home. Anyway, the Parcourse is a series of 18 stations, each of which has you stop jogging and do a different exercise. They range from light stuff like stretching and jumping jacks to heavier exercises like sit ups, lunges, push ups, pull ups, and so on. At the time I felt strong despite my relatively stationary lifestyle for the past couple of months, but by about station 13 I was starting to pant pretty heavily and having trouble lifting my legs, and when we got to the pull up bar I was unable to do more than just hang from it until Malaya goaded me into doing a few. I managed five, and felt okay once I was doing them, but my arms felt like jello until I started. After the pull up bar we continued on for a half mile or so, mostly walking, and on the way back, once we had our breath back, we hit the pull up bar again, and I was able to do 10 pretty confidently. Further back there was a push up bar set up, and I did 25 of those, with much grunting once I was past 20. They had actual bars set at various heights off of the ground, and I really liked that. At home I do them on the floor on my fists, and the angle is okay, but it hurts my wrists. Having a real bar to grasp was great since it gave much better leverage, and now I want one at home. Anyway, we did the course out of order somehow, since we had heavy upper body work like three out of the last four stations, and after the pull ups and push ups and vault, I couldn't manage even half the parallel bar thing. The 18 stations are set up along a straight path, as I said, and they have numbers on them, so in theory you'd hit #1, and then skip a few to #2, and then back to #3, and so on, thus working the various areas of your body equally, as well as covering a whole two miles of distance. Several of the stations were less than 50 feet apart, so we'd hardly even get into a jogging pace from one before we hit the next. Before I got all distracted, my point was going to be that we both enjoyed it Friday and felt good, and then Saturday we could hardly walk. My hamstrings were the real area of suffering, probably from doing a ton of lunges. (At Malaya's direction.) I can walk, but it was a struggle to go up or down stairs on Saturday, being as both actions involving lifting my legs more than six inches. Sunday my left one is still a bit sore while the right is still just death, so I think next time on the Parcourse I'll be cutting back on the number of lunges a bit. We both still have sore upper chests from the various pull/push ups, but those are more like the "good kind" of sore. And while I'm supposedly in better shape, at least to the naked eye, you'll note that while Malaya took Saturday off, she was able to hit the gym for her hour work out Sunday morning, while I could hardly get out of bed. And she'll work out again Monday, while I'll likely still feel too sore to get out and run the Parcourse, or much of anything else.
Saturday, for the first time in a couple of months, I got in a nice bike ride. I didn't realize how long it had been until I was suiting up for it and realized how unfamiliar my biking shoes felt, and saw how flat my bike tires were. As I detailed here in far-too-exhaustive detail, I rode my bike 2 or 3x a week for much of early 2003, both to get into shape for work, and to shed a few pounds to look better for Malaya. I was successful on both fronts, and since I get plenty of leg exercise at work, and have been out of town for all of my time off the last month, I hadn't had time/inclination for a bike ride for a while. Perhaps because of the time off, I enjoyed it quite a bit. My legs felt really strong, stronger than they did in March and April, no doubt due to work, and my lung capacity was much the same. Hills that would either set my legs to trembling or my breath to gasping a couple of months ago still did, but to a much lesser extent, and I felt the strongest I've ever felt on my bike out in the steep Mission Trails Park hills. That's a time frame that extends back only about two years, so while it's not exactly a comprehensive comparison, I'd rather be in the best shape I've been in for two years than the alternative... Before the ride I wasn't sure how I'd feel during it, but I did want to take along my digicam, to get some shots of the hills now that the dry summer has pretty well set in, and the hills are looking very brown, as they do most every year from about May-January. Unfortunately I forgot the camera, so while you can see them all green and lush in photos from earlier this year, you've got nothing to compare to in terms of how they look now. I'll probably go ride again Tuesday or Wednesday, to get some more exercise before my last five days of work start up Friday, and I'll try to remember the camera then. The hills aren't quite as brown/dry as usual, since it was a very wet winter/spring, at least by San Diego standards, and some of the chaparral is still green, amidst the mostly brown former-vegetation. All the grass is long gone though, the trails are very dry and dusty, and the dirt is hard as a rock. I'm not sure what that makes the rocks are hard as, but they were damn hard. I was jolted and battered from side to side repeatedly, though I did manage to stay on the bike the whole time, and with my stronger than expected legs I could power up hills that forced me to a staggering walk in the past, and I needed fewer rest breaks while doing it. I have no idea how many hills I climbed or how many miles I rode or how many calories I burned, but my heart was going very quickly for at least a steady 60 minutes, and when I finished my legs were really singing and sore; far more so than they are after a very busy night of miles up and down stairs at work. So it was a good work out. Malaya has been hitting the gym every day for weeks, working hard to firm up and lose some weight, mostly to provide better eye candy for me, and while I'm in better shape than she is for now, I'm thinking I'd like to get really ripped and toned, and that I might join a gym for that purpose once I'm living with her. I'd like to do more "real" exercise up there, of the bike riding or running or swimming type, and outdoors I mean, rather than on a machine in a gym. Especially since she's working out at a women-only gym now, and I couldn't get in and jog away next to my sweetie. At least not without a lot of make up and wigs and padded bras of the low-budget movie type. And since her gym is a short walk from her condo, and she therefore wears her work out clothing there and walks home to shower afterwards, I wouldn't even get the benefit of infiltrating the women's locker room in my disguise. So really, what's the point then? If I were to join a gym, it would be largely to lift heavy things, and bulk up some more. That would be purely for cosmetic reasons, and since I'm in good shape now, and Malaya loves how I look naked, why should I bother? Good question. She also wants to get into some martial arts training, and since I've been wanting to get into that since I was about 9, but never have done so, we'll be picking a discipline and getting into that, in the same class. I don't know how much exercise/work out that would be; I suppose it would depend a lot on how much effort I put into it and what sort of discipline we began to study, but it would certainly be some exercise, though I doubt it would do much for me in terms of weight lifting. Though when you get down to it, muscles, smuscles, the real benefit is to be able to kill a man with my bare hands, just like Steven Seagal's stunt double does. Though hopefully I can dispense with the pot belly and greasy little pony tail.
Fitness stuff. I had no intention of writing this, but just this morning I got an email from a reader who liked my D2 stories a lot, and asked about that. I replied on that topic, but since I've beaten it to death on this site already, I'll spare you that recap of a recap. In his email he also asked this though, about something I've never talked about in any detail. Cheeba said:
Here's what I emailed him, with a few slight modifications/typo corrections. As for working out, yeah,
the bad news is that you need to work out to build up muscles. ;) Only on
late night TV commercials are muscles formed as if by magic in 5 minutes a
day on some plastic toy you buy for 3 easy payments of $19.99. To loose weight you can diet, or you can exercise, or you can do both I'm not good at dieting since I don't like to be hungry. Plus I need energy for working out, and I feel more mentally there and active when I'm not hungry. So what I do is eat healthier and lower calorie. I can't go without eating very well, but it's easy to eat rice and veggies instead of a pizza, for example. You can build up muscle quite quickly, if you just do something every day. I had no upper body development at all 5 or 6 months ago, and since I put a pull up bar in my living room and started doing a few every couple of hours, the results came through in just a couple of months. I don't have any good pics of my chest, but one from a week ago.
It's not massive weight and you don't have to get all sweaty and do it for an hour. Just do it, push ups would work alright but pull ups also are better. When doing push ups vary your hand placement so you are working different muscles each time. I often feel it more in my arms and elbows and shoulders than in my chest, so I'll find a position, arms up higher or lower, that doesn't hurt, or hurts differently. Do not do 50 and then walk around all day with jelly arms. Do 15 or 20 or however many you can, and do that every 3 or 4 hours, every day. I think that does more good, and you certainly don't feel as tired from it. If you stick with the push/pull ups, you'll see results in just 2 or 3 months.
As for abs, I like this one more than the pic I posted more recently.
When doing sit ups of any kind, you must keep clenched. that's the whole key. You do 10 sit ups with good form and your belly clenched, you'll be exhausted. You can probably do 30 with poor form and not clenching and not get half the muscle work out. The goal is to get a work out and you'll know you have when you feel tired. The number is irrelevant, the stress is what matters. And I'd like to spend at little time as possible doing it, personally, so I'll do 30 in good form and be reduced to crawling into bed, rather than doing 50 and not being tired yet. Do them to the sides,
straight up, kick with your legs while holding your head up (this does the
lower belly more), etc. It really doesn't matter how you do them, you just
have to do them until your stomach is screaming and clenching. Try to do a
variety so you get different muscle groups. Don't do so many that you
can't sit up the next day, just do enough to get a nice buzz going, and do
that several times a day. Just lie down every now and then and do them for
2 or 3 minutes. I am not into a big hour long work out, but stealing a few
minutes every now and then doesn't seem like a time expenditure. The whole key to exercise is to find something you enjoy doing enough to keep doing it. Common sense, but people always say, "I'll start that aerobics class. next week." and they never do. I would never go to a spin class; but I look forward to going for a bike ride out in nature. And I live somewhere with good weather, which certainly helps. Another thing with the muscle is to stretch a lot. This is good advice even if you don't work out, especially if you spend a lot of time sitting at a computer. Which is a pretty safe bet if you're reading this, eh? Muscle gain will pull your tendons and ligaments tighter, and you'll be sore a lot and get tighter. Stretching where it hurts helps. Not so much arms, but back, sides, and stomach. I do my legs a lot also since I have to walk at work, and my hips and thighs get sore from the bike riding. As you get stronger you won't be sore after sitting all day, but you can be sore in new ways from the muscles pulling you out of alignment. Just stretch, lean into it and hold it for a bit while breathing deeply and feeling it relax. I don't think it's real scientific, stretch where it hurts/feels good to stretch. After I do a ton of sit ups and my abs are burning, I always stretch them (lie flat on your stomach, put your hands near your waist and lift your chest up. back arching sorta. hold it until you feel the back and belly stretching. breathe) and do back stretches also. Anyway, I don't think you
need any sort of program or machine help, just do a little bit every day,
and you'll build up. And as you build up you can do more and more, and
that's positive reinforcement, as is the mirror, and it's very nice if you
have a romantic attachment who will say you look good and encourage you
further also. And if you don't, knowing you look good/better is a
marvelous confidence booster to find one.
And what I said above about weight training aside, I am considering joining a gym to do some weight lifting. I've always wanted to be somewhat muscular. Nothing like Conan, but more than I was, and having seen how easily I put on muscle just doing occasional pull ups, I'm tempted to get on a regular lifting regimen and see how that goes. I also figure if I put on 10 lbs of muscle it would be mostly my fat that was turning into it, and that would take care of both problems at once. It goes without saying to say that I'll let you know if I do and how it goes.
The next day's blog brought some feedback: First, from Boidea.
Also on the fitness topic that I went on and on about yesterday, Cheeba wrote back. It was his mail that prompted the whole thing yesterday to begin with.
I never read diet or exercise advice, other than if I see some sort of "New exercise to firm your abs!" article online. I'll check that out just to see what they say, and if they have a new pose or posture or something. They seldom do. I think the problem for most people is that they are very passive-aggressive about being fit. Like they want to be fitter, have a six-pack, whatever, but at the same time they are annoyed that they have to work at it. So people do sit ups or crunches or whatever, but they intentionally do them poorly. Like a pouting 12 y/o with unwanted homework. Look, if you want to get into better shape, do your exercises properly and feel the burn. If you don't want to, don't pretend. When you're doing a crunch or push up or whatever, you know if you are doing it correctly, since you can feel the burn or stretch or whatever. If you do it half-assed or with poor form, you don't feel like it's exercise, and it's not doing you any good. I'd rather do 5 minutes 10x a day than 50 minutes at once, and I'd rather do 20 crunches as hard as I can and be gasping than do 50 with lazy form and not be tired. Do it quick and correctly, and then go do other stuff. Don't drag it out with a half-hearted effort that doesn't really do you any good. Come strong or stay home. Etc. And that reminds me. *gets up to do pull ups and some crunches* have wanted a pull up bar for a while, and found an old one I had lying around at my dad's house last week, when I was cleaning up some old junk from my bedroom there. I'm not sure why I wanted one, probably so I'd have an excuse to hang from something in my living room while making fierce faces. As pictured. Rarr!
Even if it did stay up, it's stuck in a doorway, so you're going to have to do them with bent knees, and watch out that you don't brain yourself on top of the doorway. When I was looking for a photo of the bar, I had problems, since about the first 30 results were for much sexier devices like this one. It's long and curved and made from multiple pieces, and seems to wedge in, but then use your weight to push on the wall in front and pull on the back/top. I'd think those work pretty well, though $53 for one seems a bit steep. I wasn't aware of this breakthrough technology, and probably wouldn't have cared if I had been. Even if I had that, it wouldn't work well here. I only have three doorways in my apartment, other than the front door (which goes outside), and you can see them both in the bigger photo below. One goes to the bathroom (left, you can see the shower), the second goes into a small storage closet, and the third goes into the bedroom, which is to the right, behind the D2 poster. All three have a common problem for a pull up device; low ceiling.
I've long had a modern art looking thing overhead in my living room. You can see a piece of it here, or the whole thing right here. It's made from some branches, screws, and a bunch of twisted metal cable (formerly a coat hanger) to hold the pieces together. It's a snake climbing thing, a way to let them out and get some exercise without vanishing beneath the fridge or knocking over chairs and tables. The chain holding it up is not sufficient to bear human weight, and even if it were the branches aren't. So while it's not useful, the concept of it, hanging overhead, so easily-grabbed, was instructive. The bolts on each end of the pull up bar easily unscrew all the way, so I just needed to get a chain with links big enough to poke them through and I could do so, then screw the ends back on, and it would be a perfect swing/pull up bar. I had a bunch of metal hooks sufficient to bear human weight already, since I use about 8 of them to hold up my hanging plants, so those were no problem. I'd borrowed the drill from dad's house the day before, so it was easy to get on a chair, bang on the ceiling with the handle of a screw driver until I found suitable studs, and then drill the holes and screw in the hooks. I measured how far down the bar should be, which was pretty easy since I wanted it about the height of the snake climbing thing (overhead, but not out of reach) and headed off to Home Depot on my way to run some other errands. I took one of the screw ends with me to Home Depot, tried progressively larger chains until I found one that was just large enough, and fortunately not the size of something you'd see attached to an anchor. For the whopping price of $1.88 a foot I got two 20" lengths cut for me, and billed as three feet of chain. Home Depot is cool, they always give you a bit more than you pay for on anything cut to length. Buy three feet, get four inches free! Sounds like the slogan of a penile enlargement service, huh? Leaving Home Depot was funny, with this big length of chain in my fist. I felt like I was on the way to a street fight from the 50's, and holding chain you can certainly feel how deadly it would be to whack someone with. The flexibility gives it greater velocity when swung, since the end cracks around. Fortunately, no one cut me off in the parking lot or came up with a bat wanting to rumble, and I was able to control my impulses. Installation was effortless after that, since I had the hooks up already, and the length measured. Just put one end through the last link on each length of chain, hung them... and discovered that one was somehow two links longer than the other. That matters not at all, since I just hung it two from the end, but it was a funny moment. Okay, you had to be there. Here. Anyway, it's a good height, the roof didn't come crashing down when I first tested it, (though there were some alarming creakings the first few tries) and I can easily stand on a chair and hook it through about a foot higher up if I want to hang fully. That was a planned by product, since my lower back is often stiff and compressed, and hanging has a very nice stretching feel, so long as I can fully dangle; if I have to tuck my knees that pulls the muscles tight and it doesn't work. Yes, I said, "fully dangle". Quit giggling. I was going to take pictures of all of the parts as I went, documenting such fascinating things as drilling holes in acoustic treated drywall and unscrewing a bolt, but fortunately I realized in time that 1) it would be boring, and 2) this isn't Cockeyed.com. If you're planning on making something and want to turn it into a website feature, be sure the process is more interesting than an outtake from This Old House. The predictable result is that I've been doing a few pull ups every time I get up, and by now, six hours later, both of my forearms and wrists are so sore and strained that I can hardly type. When I was a kid I always had the most upper body strength of anyone I knew, proportionally. I couldn't beat bigger kids arm wrestling, but I could kill them in pull ups. I remember doing 40 or something like that in 7th grade the day of the physical fitness testing stuff, and the teacher being amazed since the big muscular football player types couldn't do half that many. Of course I weighed about 120 pounds and was wire-thin, but anyway. My dad's house at that time had a spiral staircase to a small upper story loft, and I would monkey around on it all the time, going hand over hand up and down the bottom of it, with my feet near the railing just in case. The floor beneath was hard ceramic tiles, but I never fell. It wasn't a wild swinging thing, I just went up and down it a lot while talking to friends or dad or watching TV. End result of that was endless pull up capacity, mostly by accident. I get a pretty good upper body work out with my stadium job, and I also lift barbells from time to time, but far from religiously, so I'm looking forward to boosting my upper body strength a lot with the handy pull up bar. Plus it's fun. Now if I could just get back into the mode of doing several hundred sit ups a day, like I used to, and get the six-pack back in top form. Given how often I'm topless in public with anyone around I want to impress, me working out is the equivalent of a woman getting new implants and wearing big baggy sweaters, but I'll thank you for not bringing that up.
I did not have a blog going when I first began riding a mountain bike in December of 2001, but since this is the first entry ever post-bike, I'm archiving it here.
So, another boring, predictable, blow out Superbowl. Yawn. I watched the game at my Dad's house, and as it was boring early on, and the sun was shining outside, and I had some energy, I took my new/his old mountain bike out for an hour or so. Mission Trails park is near his house, and it's a great place to ride, with dirt trails ranging from granny-walking to mountain goat. I like the winding, steep ones, and I'm learning to ride up the steepest, though my legs still aren't quite up to the task and need more breaks than I'd like to give them. My body's weaknesses infuriate me. I want to just stand and power up the hills, to pedal non-stop with no regard for fatigue or gravity. And I can do so, for about 5 minutes at a time. Then I have to stop and struggle to remain upright/conscious, as I drink water between desperate gasps of air. Bah. I'm improving though, got the bike from my dad when he got his new one in mid-Dec, and then I was exhausted for days after a long ride. Now I can do the same stuff that almost killed me a month ago, and feel fine afterwards. I see those bike classes at gyms, and it seems so pointless, all riding along with others on stationary bikes, with loud music, and an instructor shouting at you. The whole fun of riding for me is hills, corners, especially the dirt trails, and it's an excuse to get out of the apartment in the day time (something I usually avoid at all costs). I guess the benefit of health club class is doing it at any time, other people there for motivation, and hopefully you get behind some hot chicks in those tight shorts. Fit woman in biking shorts is high on my list of "great scenery", perhaps a notch or two above the dirt, rocks, and chaparral I see on my rides. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
hile
most such updates are along the lines of "I rode my bike/jogged for an hour
today." I write about the exercise I'm doing (or
not) on such a regular basis that an articles archive page that collected
nothing but those would be the largest articles page on the site in very short
order. Therefore, this page will archive blog entries in which I talk
about exercising, but only the times when I do so at length, or in which I
impart advice or a great deal of personal knowledge. And even at that,
I'll be pretty sparring in what I add, to keep this page from becoming an
amazingly long and repetitious collection of sit up anecdotes.
